“Ieng Thirith was not a passive individual who became linked to the Khmer Rouge exclusively through her status as Ieng Sary’s wife and Pol Pot’s sister-in-law”, said Youk Chhang, director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia which researches the atrocities.
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Led by “Brother Number One” Pol Pot, who died in 1998, the Khmer Rouge dismantled modern society and wiped out almost a quarter of Cambodia’s population through starvation, overwork and execution in a bid to create an agrarian utopia.
The case against her was suspended following a ruling she was unfit to stand trial due to dementia.
After returning to Cambodia in 1957, she worked as a professor and founded a private English school in the capital, Phnom Penh.
She was the widow of Khmer Rouge foreign minister Ieng Sary – and herself a social affairs minister under the regime. He died in March 2013, at the age of 87, while his trial was ongoing.
Former head of state Khieu Samphan and chief ideologue Nuon Chea are now on trial at the Phnom Penh court, facing charges for a wide array of crimes, including genocide.
A senior-ranking member of Democratic Kampuchea, Thirith was also the sister-in-law of the movement’s late supreme leader Pol Pot and had been ill for several months. The two are now being tried on further charges of genocide.
She allegedly participated in the regime’s regulation of marriage including its orchestration of mass forced marriages.
In the end she passed away in a former Khmer Rouge stronghold on the border with Thailand where many regime leaders settled after they were ousted by the Vietnamese.
She had been hospitalised this year in Thailand with heart, bladder and lung problems.
Though two of her high-ranking co-defendants were found guilty past year and sentenced to life in prison, her death highlights concerns that full justice may never be attained because death may overtake the judicial process.
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“Her body will be cremated on Monday evening”, her son Ieng Vuth told AFP by telephone from Pailin, adding his mother had died from cardiac arrest. “She remained under judicial supervision until her death”.
